


getting along like a house on fire (and like a phoenix we will rise)

by eleutheria_has_won



Category: The Underland Chronicles - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Child Soldiers, Coping Mechanisms, Gen, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma, i was having a bad day okay, this is what i do on my bad days
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-14
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-04-04 09:08:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4131945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleutheria_has_won/pseuds/eleutheria_has_won
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Campbell siblings are very close.</p>
<p>(Or, the very strange adventures of three very strange children.)</p>
<p>((Or, a study in alternative coping mechanisms))</p>
            </blockquote>





	getting along like a house on fire (and like a phoenix we will rise)

" _What happens now  
__When all I've made is torn down?_ "

  -- Nichole Nordeman, "The Unmaking"

 

One week after they emerged onto the surface for the last time, the three children of the Campbell family found themselves, by 'coincidental' happenstance, kneeling on the thin wooden floorboards in Gregor's room. In later years, a meeting of this kind would come to be called a Sibling Summit, with all the due solemnity the name implied.

Gregor was on his knees, weight rested back so he sat on his calves. Boots was on his back, one pudgy three-year-old arm around his neck and the other tucked between her chest and his back, her round, cherubic face peering over his shoulder as she sucked on her chubby fist. Lizzie was directly across from him in a mirroring position, albeit without the toddler on her back. Since Gregor's room was less of a room, more of a repurposed closet, there was maybe five square feet of empty floor space in between the bed, the dresser, and the door for them to kneel on. Gregor's right side was tucked up against the side of the bed and his left side was brushing the closed door; his heels were pressed against the dresser drawers. Lizzie's left side was against the bed and her right brushing the door; her heels were pressed against the bare white wall. There was maybe two or three inches of space between their knees.

The rickety, creaky floorboards were faintly cool, faintly clammy on Lizzie's shins.

His arms were limp, his hands resting palms-up in his lap, loose and unthreatening, like a gesture of surrender. Her arms curled inward to press her elbows to her bellybutton, her fingers knotting and unknotting in a stress-fueled tangle against her too-thin thighs.

Lizzie wore a worn-through cotton dress, knee-length, once a sunny color and now the color of blotchy cream. No sleeves, just loose strips of washed-thin cotton; it hung from her skinny clavicles like a circus tent. The threadbare dress made her look waifish and skinny -- which, of course, at all of nine, she was. Gregor wore a pair of sweatpants, old and grey, with a matted drawstring. They were his dad's, because he'd outgrown all his own things in the months underground. That was all. His torso was bare, unless one counted all the pink-silver-gray scars that striped and spotted and dappled it. It looked like paint splatter in the shining dustmotes of the sunlight. He had a child's skinny chest and a sword-fighter's wiry arms.

Boots was in an old loose t-shirt of their father's, from many years before. It was at least three or four times too big for her -- it would have been too big on _Gregor_ \-- and it pooled around her like a train. The neck of it was so big that it kept threatening to slip down over her shoulders entirely. It had been washed so threadbare over the years that the white cloth felt like downy tissue paper, faintly diaphanous. Eyes glittering with toddlerish attention and looking up through her lashes in uncharacteristic shyness, the baby looked even younger than she was.

For a trio of children -- because at ages 12, 9, and 3, that was what they were, _children_ \- they were solemn.

"Grandma's not going to be okay," Lizzie started, voice hushed.

"We're not going to Virginia soon. Maybe at all," Gregor agreed quietly.

The dustmotes danced in the golden sunlight from the window, and they looked at each other and breathed. The light splayed across the white wall above Lizzie's head and cast a rich, subdued glow across the whole room, it caught in the dark frizz of her hair and turned it all to gold, and they breathed. It was very quiet, for New York City. The atmosphere felt holy, felt meditative and divine; like a cathedral made of three.

"Do you still have the nightmares, too?" The girl whispered.

"I do," her brother said.

The baby sucked a little harder on her fist.

This was not at all 'happenstance.' This was, in a word, an intervention. They held each other's eyes and they looked at each other and they breathed.

They had the same eyes, all three of them, a liquid brown-almost-black inherited from their father. She thought about church. She thought about a book called psalms. Gregor's eyes were dark pools, deep and fathomed.

She thought about still waters.

(She thought about the stillness at the eye of the storm.)

(Lizzie's fingers tightened around each other and were still now.)

Lizzie let her eyes fall to wandering, tracing over the metal-grey scars as delicate as silver filigree. He held still for her hesitant inspection, even when she leaned forward and almost -- not quite -- brushed the dark tips of her fingers over the place where the Bane had gouged a groove through the bone of his sternum. (Where he'd nearly carved out his heart.)

"They hurt you," she said, softly, so softly, eyes darting from scar to scar.

"Yes," he said.

"There are so many of them," she whispered to herself in wonder, even softer.

"Yes," he whispered.

The spattered bareness of his skin was a tribute to everything that'd tried to kill him. (There had been so, so many.)

They'd become strange creatures to each other, sometime between his scars and her code. He was patient, and stayed still as she sought what meaning she could find in the pattern of his inscribed sins. He let her look.

His hands clenched and curled into themselves.

(She studied him like a code.)

"Are you okay?" the boy asked, watching his sister's face.

"No," the sister whispered, sliding to a halt, going so still. Her hand, hovering in front of her, she pulled back against her chest, and she retreated, giving him back his space. She did it all in slowly, like if she moved slowly enough, the truth wouldn't show itself. Her eyes remained wide, but did not look up to meet him. "Are you?" asked she.

Her brother shook his head, slowly, careful not to dislodge his second sister. "No."

She looked down at her hands, sitting in her lap.

The truth was there, and it hurt.

"We're not... we're not who we were," she said, "are we."

"We're never going to be," he said. "We can't. I don't... I don't think it works like that. We'll always know... what we've done."

He was very careful not to look at his hands.

They were strange creatures. Even to themselves. Maybe especially to themselves.

Lizzie looked at him, and thought about what their futures were going to be like, for people like her brother, for people like her, even though it hurt and it was sad and she didn't want to at all.

"Who are we, then?" she asked, because she didn't know and she had to.

"I don't know," Gregor said, slowly, not looking at her, "I don't know. I don't know who I am. Now. Not anymore. I was a soldier, but now... not anymore. I'm... I'm a kid, now? But I don't..."

"Me neither," Lizzie whispered. "How do we fix this?"

"I don't think we can," Gregor said. He looked at his hands, curled over his lap and raised them toward his face slightly to study them more closely.  "This... this is never going to go away." His hands shook. "We're always going to be broken."

They were quiet for a long time after that.

"What do we do?" Lizzie asked, quiet and small and defeated.

Gregor shrugged, dropping his hands into his lap and flinching slightly when the combined movement tugged too hard on his healing chest. "We figure it out," said he. "We keep trying. There's got to be _something_ left to work with. We're still here."

There had to be something. He (wasn't, wasn't, wasn't) couldn't be just empty. Couldn't be just a soldier (a killer) with no war to fight. There had to be more left in him than that. He'd been a person once. He had to believe he could be again.

Lizzie swallowed hard. The thought was... And he... Oh, the idea was sickeningly painful, digging through the emotional rubble of who she used to be, just to find enough pieces to put together into someone she could be again. A Frankenstein's monster of a human being.

But she couldn't do anything less.

Lizzie looked up to see a hand held in front of her, palm outward. Gregor looked at her, waiting. She held up her own hand and placed it against his, palm-against-palm. She lifted her chin and looked him in the eyes over their hands.

"I'm scared," she said.

"I know," he said quietly. "Me too. It's going to hurt, and it's not going to be fun."

"What if it doesn't work?," she said.

"It will. It has to," he said. "There's no other choice."

"Together?" she asked.

"Yes," he said. "Yes. Of course, yes. We don't have to be alone for it. I don't think we could and stay sane. Of course, together."

"Always," she whispered, smiling.

He smiled then, and so did she. Their hands drifted downward, drifted apart into their separate laps. But it felt unfinished. Incomplete.

Lizzie's eyes fell again.

"Can I?" She whispered.

He didn't speak. But he nodded.

When she touched the middle of the five biggest marks across his chest, his neck turned to water. His head dropped to his chest, abruptly unsupported, and it happened a soundlessly, like a puppet cut of it's strings. Lizzie stilled and looked up at him, at his face for a moment. At Boots's round face and dark eyes, curled behind his shoulder, looking up  curiously through her lashes.

Splaying her fingers, Lizzie tilted her hand and fitting the tip of each finger against the tip of each scar, drew the soft pads of her fingers down their length.

Gregor _trembled_.

The scars of the blow that had ( ~~almost~~ ) taken his life.

The scars of the war that had ( ~~almost~~ ) taken his soul.

The first and last wound he would ever have to mend in the process of remembering how to be human.

In the stillness of the moment as Gregor shook, Boots stirred and blinked at her siblings. Seeing something, she unhooked her arm from around Gregor's neck and slid down his back, thumb still in her mouth. Landing on the floor with a small thump of bare feet on wood, she stepped over the tangle of Gregor's folded legs and stood next to him, beside his quaking shoulders. She looked at him quizzically, like she didn't quite get what he thought he was doing.

(He couldn't get enough _air_.)

Then, with the forthrightness of a child, she crouched down and crawled under Gregor's arms, over his folded knees, into the hunched and painful curl of his body, into his lap. Gregor hiccuped wetly in shock -- the first sound of raw emotion he'd made this whole time -- but he couldn't help but let it happen. He had no choice but to put his arms around her and just hold on.

Lizzie tilted forward, and pressed the heel of her hand firmly against her brother's breastbone, then wrapped her thin arms around his neck and did not lean in to the hug so much as she collapsed.

The hurricane howled around their ears and they were children, and they were broken and they were unready. How do you prepare a child for trauma? The answer, simply, is that you do not. Battered by the things that happened to them, they shook like leaves and were violently still. The storm had them now, and it would not let them go; not without a long, hard fight.

But if this was a hurricane, then Gregor thought that the eye of it was here.

That was when he began to cry.

Gregor was crying.

Gregor was really, truly, finally crying.

It was catharsis and it was powerful, sweeping through him and it was tearing everything loose and it was tearing everything away. His insides were being scoured. He felt, somehow, like he was finally getting clean.

Gregor was crying, but he was _laughing_ , too, sick and wet and choking out giggles over sobs but it was _real_. Lizzie started to giggle with him, and then she started to cry. Lizzie leaned in and held tighter and let it happen.

Gregor was crying, and the flood would wash them all clean.

When he leaned with his hand on her shoulder, the other arm wrapped around Boots, Lizzie felt raw and open. When he cupped her cheek, Lizzie felt stripped of all her skin. When he kissed her forehead and she felt his tears dripping off his chin and onto her head, it felt like a benediction; she felt like something new.

Gregor leaned forward and wrapped a strong arm around her shoulders and kept her from shaking herself apart.

Lizzie let her head drop and rest on her brother's collarbone.

"We're still here," she said, gripping the hem of her dress with both hands. She just had to remember. She just had to believe. "We're still here."

 

" _This is the unmaking_  
_Beauty in the breaking  
__Had to lose myself to find out who you are_

_Before each beginning_  
_There must be an ending  
__Sitting in the rubble I can see the stars_ "

  -- Nichole Nordeman, "The Unmaking"


End file.
